Testing Rails RESTful Web Services with curl

Wednesday, November 12th
by fred

Today I found the need to test out some RoR RESTful based web services. I figured I could A. write a quick client app or B. find some tool to do it for me. Doing a Mr. Google search I ran across a this post by Derek Brooks doing just what i was looking for. He uses curl to test web services so I just followed his procedure and basically came up with the following.

#Note the -X arg that specifies what HTTP method to use
# and -H to set the Accept Header and Content type

GET
> curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/locations
or
> curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/locations/1
DELETE
> curl -X DELETE http://localhost:3000/locations/1
PUT (note the lack of -X since put is default)
> curl -H "Accept: text/xml" -H "Content-type: application/xml" -d "<?xml version =’1.0′ encoding ‘UTF-8′?><location><abbreviation>AVC</abbreviation><city>Lancaster</city><country>USA</country></location>" http://localhost:3000/locations/1
POST
> curl -X POST -H "Accept: text/xml" -H "Content-type: application/xml" -d "<?xml version =’1.0′ encoding ‘UTF-8′?><location><abbreviation>AVC</abbreviation><city>Lancaster</city><country>USA</country></location>" http://localhost:3000/locations/1

Simple LDAP authentication with Ruby

Tuesday, November 11th
by fred

This is the super simple way I have done LDAP authentication with rails.  Basically I am just checking to see if ldap will bind with the username and password.  Also I am checking to see if that user exists.

def authenticate
  authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |username, password|
   ldap = Net::LDAP.new :host => ‘ldap.host.com’, :base => ‘ou=active, ou=employees, ou=people, o=host.com’
   ldap.auth ‘uid=’ + username + ‘,ou=active,ou=employees,ou=people,o=host.com’, password
   if ldap.bind
    @point_person = PointPerson.find_by_username(username)
    if !@point_person.nil?
     return true
    end
   else
    return false
   end
  end
 end

James Gosling today at work

Thursday, November 6th
by fred

Was an interesting work day today.  James Gosling of Java fame gave a lecture about all things Java and also told some great stories about his life.  I think what I found interesting was his talk on the Brazilian healthcare systems infrastructure.  The whole system being written in Java, pretty amazing.  It made me wonder, I believe President Obama’s healthcare plan includes upgrading the American health care IT infrastucture.  Would sometthing similar to Brazils system be put into place?

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